New high-rise on Broadway would be one of tallest in Southland

The apartment and retail complex, called Broadway @ 4th, would house 450 units and fill in a key block in gentrifying downtown L.A., developer Izek Shomof said.

By Roger Vincent | LA TIMES

It’s been generations since a high-rise building had its debut on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, but the skyline is finally in for a dramatic change.

A local developer hopes to transform a homely corner of the city’s famed commercial corridor early next year by leveling a drab one-story retail center at 4th Street and Broadway. In its place would be a 34-story apartment skyscraper more than twice as tall as most other buildings in the historic core of downtown L.A.

To be built at a cost of nearly $150 million, the apartment and retail complex called Broadway @ 4th would house 450 units and fill in a key block in gentrifying downtown L.A., developer Izek Shomof said.

To market observers who saw the city’s former elite streets of Broadway, Spring and Main become run-down and plagued by drugs and crime during the latter decades of the 20th century, it’s remarkable that an extravagant upscale apartment tower would even be built in the neighborhood, much less one that would stand taller than City Hall.

“It’s a new day for Broadway that large-scale construction is even proposed,” said property preservationist Adrian Scott Fine, director of advocacy for the Los Angeles Conservancy. “It wouldn’t have even been on anyone’s mind 10 years ago.”

Most buildings in the historic core date to the early 20th century. The most recent high-rise was an office tower completed at Spring and 6th streets in 1961. Soon after that, Fine said, many businesses began leaving the city’s historic downtown blocks for newer office buildings on Bunker Hill and other blocks near the Harbor Freeway.

But developer Shomof has enjoyed success in recent years renovating old office buildings on nearby Spring Street and turning them into apartments served by hip restaurants, bars, nightclubs and shops…